Randall Kline beats drum for SFJazz Center

SUNDAY PROFILE / Randall Kline

Updated 10:38 pm, Saturday, January 19, 2013

Randall Kline has spent 30 years building SFJazz from a money-losing festival into a thriving shrine to jazz and Latin sounds.

Randall Kline has spent 30 years building SFJazz from a money-losing festival into a thriving shrine to jazz and Latin sounds.

Photo: Michael Short, Special To The Chronicle

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Randall Kline, founder of SFJazz, in the stairway of his new jazz venue in San Francisco, California, on Wednesday, January 2, 2013. After 30 years of having concerts in rented halls is opening the SFJAZZ center in the Civic Center later this month. less

Randall Kline, founder of SFJazz, in the stairway of his new jazz venue in San Francisco, California, on Wednesday, January 2, 2013. After 30 years of having concerts in rented halls is opening the SFJAZZ ... more

Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle

Image 3 of 3

Founder Randall Kline in the SFJazz Center, opening Monday with only New York's Jazz at Lincoln Center as precedent.

Founder Randall Kline in the SFJazz Center, opening Monday with only New York's Jazz at Lincoln Center as precedent.

Tech guys in orange and green safety vests worked around the stage as music filled the refined minimalist space at the core of the new cultural center at Franklin and Fell streets. A smile played on the face of the tenacious impresario, whose decades-old dream of building a permanent home in San Francisco for improvised music has finally come to fruition in the $64 million SFJazz Center, opening Monday.

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Kline is a perfectionist whose attention to detail and obsession with "getting it right" can make him tough to please. But on this cold winter afternoon 10 days before the opening - as he, acoustician Sam Berkow and their team tweaked the sound in the 700-seat Robert N. Miner Auditorium and scrambled to get the center ready for the ribbon-cutting - he was happy.

"It's unbelievable. It just sounds so beautiful," said Kline, the founding executive artistic director of SFJazz, which over the past 30 years has grown from a money-losing two-day festival into a major year-round arts organization that presents and commissions a wide spectrum of jazz, Latin and other global music.

Kline spent years working with San Francisco architect Mark Cavagnero to create a performance space that could somehow combine the intimacy and energy of a jazz club with the acoustics of a great concert hall. He wanted to set the performance space in a welcoming contemporary building that expressed the openness of jazz.

The only precedent for the SFJazz Center is New York's Jazz at Lincoln Center, a 100,000-square-foot facility that opened in 2004 on two floors of the Time Warner Center. Its performance spaces were also acoustically designed by Berkow.

He worked on San Francisco's Miner Auditorium - named for the late jazz-loving Oracle co-founder whose family contributed to the building - with Cavagnero and another top designer, San Francisco theater consultant Len Auberbach.

The building, a mostly transparent structure that connects the center to the street and the popping Hayes Valley neighborhood, was seeded with a $20 million gift from an anonymous Bay Area donor whose family has a 20-year friendship with Kline and SFJazz. A former bass player who dropped out of San Francisco State just shy of a music degree to put on concerts, Kline has always had a gift for programming shows and cultivating long-term relationships with everyone from musicians and patrons to funders and piano tuners.

"This wouldn't have been possible without the generosity of a donor who believed in the vision for this building," said Kline, 59, a trim, bespectacled man who already seems comfortable in his new third-floor office overlooking Fell Street.

Years in rented venues

Leaning against a chair is a big unframed photograph of bushy-haired Sonny Rollins, the towering tenor saxophonist who has performed many times at the San Francisco Jazz Festival, which, until now, SFJazz produced in rented theaters and clubs around the city.

On the desk sits a framed snapshot of Kline's son, Sam, a marketing manager at Jet Blue in New York - then in his early teens, his arm around his younger stepbrother Simone, an aspiring writer in his last year at the University of Pennsylvania. Simone's mother is Kline's second wife, Teresa, a psychologist from Bari, Italy, who, among things, cooks a killer pasta orecchiette. She and Kline met at Caffe Trieste on a blind date set up by a mutual friend. She accompanies her husband to many of the 150 or so shows SFJazz puts on a year.

"She's his ballast," said Kary Schulman, the director of San Francisco's Grants for the Arts and the woman who got Kline started in the festival business. She gave Kline and Clint Gilbert, a lighting and sound guy he'd met working at the storied Boarding House nightclub on Bush Street, a $10,000 grant to put on the first Jazz in the City festival in 1983. It was a two-night affair featuring an eclectic mix of Bay Area artists playing stride piano, bebop, Afro-Cuban and avant-garde music.

"He tells you what he wants in a direct way that's compelling," Schulman said. "There's nothing more manipulative than absolute honesty," she adds with a laugh. "So you give him the money."

Schulman, who has seen many promising arts groups come and go, calls SFJazz "an extraordinary success story, unprecedented in the city. From the beginning, Randall was interested not only in the quality and impact of what he put on stage, but in building an organization to increase that quality and impact. He believed in something and pursued it, pursued it and pursued it. A lot of people come in with big dreams, but 30 years later you don't remember them."

Book publisher Nion McEvoy, an SFJazz board member who co-chaired the center's capital campaign with novelist Robert Mailer Anderson, called Kline, "a well-balanced fanatic. He's kept this beautiful flame alive through enormous economic and cultural changes."

Kline couldn't have imagined as a youth in Swampscott, a small town on Massachusetts' North Shore, that he'd wind up creating the largest jazz presenting organization on the West Coast. He grew up in a family of six presided over by his father, Herbert, an aluminum siding salesman and gambler who played good jazz piano and turned his kids on to the beauty of Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk.

Kline's mother, Mildred, was a homemaker and a winning penny-ante poker player who was crazy for Elvis and the classics. Kline focused on music, football and getting out of Swampscott. For his bar mitzvah, he'd asked for and received an electric bass. He taught himself to play, listening to the Beatles and the Yardbirds.

"Whatever money I could scrape up I spent on records," said Kline, who recalls sitting with his father in a crowd of Dallas Cowboy fans at the 1971 Super Bowl in Miami. Herbert, who was taking bets against the Cowboys, cleaned up after the Baltimore Colts won the game in the final seconds with a field goal.

California dreaming

Kline played his first professional gigs in Boston coffee houses during a summer break from Hofstra University, backing folksinger Gilly Baker, whom he'd known in high school. At Hofstra he studied politics and played varsity football for a couple of years, then dropped out and moved to San Diego, where his older brother Neal was practicing psychiatry. He planned to establish California residency so he could study music at one of the state's vaunted free universities.

"San Diego was beautiful but boring," said Kline, who hitchhiked to San Francisco one weekend in 1975 to meet a friend, was smitten and never left. "Crossing the Bay Bridge and seeing that beautiful view of San Francisco - that image is so indelibly etched in my memory. It felt like Oz."

Kline worked briefly as a bike messenger before landing a job at the Boarding House, where he washed dishes and guarded doors before becoming a maitre d'.

"That was like going to graduate school," said Kline, who saw how the music business worked and what could go wrong. He got to see great acts there like Stan Getz, Bob Marley & the Wailers, and Steve Martin, whom he saw perform 36 shows.

"I learned a lot from Steve Martin - how he developed his craft and how he worked with his manager," Kline said.

Kline started playing around town with musicians he met at the Boarding House and took up the acoustic bass at the College of Marin, where his teachers included such fine musicians as the late San Francisco Symphony violinist Charles Meacham and saxophonist Doug Delaney.

"I was a middling bass player, and I probably could've made a living, but I was never going to be Paul Chambers," Kline said.

A regular at San Francisco's fabled Keystone Korner jazz club, Kline hit on the idea of presenting artists who performed there in San Jose on their off night, Monday. He'd noted that schools and colleges in the South Bay had jazz programs and figured there was an audience. With the blessings of Keystone's Todd Barkan, he began booking stars like saxophonist Dexter Gordon and guitarist Kenny Burrell at the Gold Rush, a San Jose urban cowboy bar with a mechanical bull. He tapped his friends to help and learned the ropes as he went.

"The idea of what I was after then hasn't really changed - the best possible program, presented in the most professional way," Kline said over dinner recently with his wife at Delfina on California Street, where the Puglian and Calabrian cuisine meets her standards. They live not far away, in an 1890s Victorian.

"I don't think I've ever met anybody more tenacious than Randall," Teresa said. "When he thinks something is right, he goes all the way and keeps at it, and I really admire that."

Some locals have criticized Kline over the years for not booking local musicians often enough, although you won't hear any complaints from the many resident artists whom he has presented. Most musicians sing his praises.

"Randall is as passionate and dedicated as anybody I've ever met in the music business," said Joshua Redman, the celebrated saxophonist whom Kline tapped to direct SFJazz's first spring season in 2000 and to lead the first incarnation of the stellar SFJazz Collective in 2004. It featured another great Bay Area musician, vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson.

Top jazz names

Redman and Hutcherson will help inaugurate the jazz center Wednesday night on a star-filled opening bill with Chick Corea, Esperanza Spalding, McCoy Tyner and others, hosted by Bill Cosby.

George Wein, the 87-year-old godfather of the jazz festival, who started the famed Newport festival in 1954, plans to fly in from New York for the occasion.

"What Randall has done is unbelievable," Wein said. "Jazz started in dance halls, went to nightclubs, made inroads into concert halls, and then festivals came along. At Jazz at Lincoln Center, the cultural hierarchy contributed to create a home for jazz. Randall did the same thing in San Francisco. They've solidified jazz as really part of the American cultural landscape."

A few weeks ago, when the SFJazz staff celebrated its arrival in its new office, there was an awkward moment when Kline was asked if he wanted to say something.

"Give me a couple of weeks and I'll come up with something profound," he replied. "Right now I'm processing it all. It really hasn't sunk in yet."

SFJazz Center

The center opens with a free public ribbon-cutting and live music event from 11:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. Monday. The inaugural concert at 6 p.m. Wednesday is sold out but will be broadcast live on KCSM (91.1 FM) and KALW (91.7 FM) and streamed live at NPR.org. For a schedule of concerts, visit www.sfjazz.org.

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